Travel time calculation in regular 3D grid in local and regional scale using fast marching method

Abstract:

Local and regional 3D seismic velocity models of crust and sediments are very important for numerous technics like mantle and core tomography, localization of local and regional events and others. Most of those techniques require calculation of wave travel time through the 3D model. This can be achieved using multiple approaches from simple ray tracing to advanced full waveform calculation. In this study simple and efficient implementation of fast marching method is presented. This method provides more information than ray tracing and is much less complicated than methods like full waveform being the perfect compromise. Presented code is written in C++, well commented and is easy to modify for different types of studies. Additionally performance is widely discussed including possibilities of multithreading and massive parallelism like GPU. Source code will be published in 2016 as it is part of the PhD thesis. National Science Centre Poland provided financial support for this work via NCN grant DEC-2011/02/A/ST10/00284.